The other day, a woman on the bus stop complained about my child. She said he was too loud, too boisterous, why didn’t I “control” him? She then flounced off in a huff, saying she could take no more of my son and his appalling behaviour. Another parent at the bus stop turned to me,…
Category: parenting horrors
Three Reasons You Should NEVER Take a Toddler to Choose Their Own Birthday Present
Let’s get this out of the way first. I know I’m a monster. If I was any sort of mother, I would have arranged for someone else (in an ideal world, my doting husband and babyfather, for example, if such a person existed, we are talking about a hypothetical IDEAL world here, not the one…
Diary of a Bedtime
“You were sleeping through by his age!” My mother’s words, uttered at regular intervals since my son turned three months old, are reaching a fever pitch. My son is almost three. He is still not “sleeping through.” OK, that is a slight lie. He has slept through, at least once, but to do so on…
Pushed to the Limit By Small Child
There has been many a day when I have returned from work to find my mother slumped on the sofa, a look of exhaustion and despair etched on her face. “It’s been a difficult day,” she would croak, as Piglet played with his cars around her, in front of Abney and Teal, making cute little…
The Public Badge of Good Motherhood: What’s so great about it anyway?
Picture the scene. You are in a cafe. Your toddler, having just had a floor-hugging, rigid back arching, high-decibel screaming meltdown over not being able to push his own buggy into the centre of the cafe and then spend the next twenty minutes using it to bash tables, and the legs of anyone who happens…
Dear Mum-to-Be, here is my rubbish advice
Recently, a friend of mine announced that she was expecting. It made me think, if I could go back and speak to myself in those hideous, anxiety-ridden, nauseating thrilling days of early pregnancy, what would I say? What sage snippets of wisdom would I have to impart? I came up with the answer today while…
You can tell a lot about a man by how he treats his mother….
When they were both wee nippers, one of my brothers hit the other one around the head with a toy milk float. It was probably the most dangerous use of a milk float until that episode of Father Ted where the evil milkman places a bomb on his milk float and Dougal gets stuck driving…
Times My Mother Was Right, and I Was Wrong
Obviously this is going to be a short list (haha, SORRY MUM). My mother and I do not always see eye to eye on all things parenting. For example, she once exclaimed to me in a horrified tone, “You’re not planning on breastfeeding him past six months, are you?” as though I had just told…
THANKS AGAIN TFL.
Most. Unproductive. Day. Ever. Piglet woke up this morning at 7.30am, which I understand from my fellow parentals is usually described as “late.” For me, this is obscenely early, and I spent over an hour whimpering “Go back to sleep” whilst being enthusiastically hit in the face by an increasingly perky baby. Once I finally…
More Hair-Raising Adventures on the London Underground
Travelling anywhere with a baby has begun to resemble a particularly farcical episode of Miranda. Today, for example, Piglet and I (plus my mother) travelled from Bristol to London on the train (Piglet’s first trip on the “big train.” He was fairly non-plussed, despite my mother’s running commentary on the journey with all vehicles played…